Give me the option of not naming each saved version

[michaelbuffington]

I save my work a lot due to the fact that I still can't trust Fusion 360 to remain stable for very long.

Sometimes I just want to save without naming or confirming anything. I could let Autosave do that for me, but I can only set Autosave to save every 15 minutes or more. I consider it a good day if Fusion 360 stays crash free for more than 10 minutes.

Even if I could set Autosave to save every 60 seconds, I'd still want to be able to simply press Cmd+S (or CTRL+S) and continue without being taken out of my flow to confirm the save.

What motived me to suggest the idea? I pressed Cmd+S and as I was moving the mouse to the confirm button, Fusion 360 crashed.

[roambotics_scott]

Not sure this would necessarily help but I totally support the idea of more frequent autosaves.. actually the ideal for me would be to just save diffs and immediately commit to disk with every operation.

It should be pretty easy to design something where the operations are atomic so you can always recover a consistent version even if the very last change was lost.

[schneik-adsk]

Scott

It is true that a per operation incremental save could be possible for simple atomic designs.  Where this gets much harder is with distributed designs.  In our past work on this we learned that there are many types of changes and some changes users are ok with you saving and making a new versions. But, there are other changes where users, don't want you to save changes. Providing a clear UI for users to choose at recovery time what to keep and what to throw away is quite complex, especially if there are interdependencies between something to be kept and something to be deleted.

We continue to discuss these topics internally. 

[casperhofstede]

As someone working in the software development industry where different products are combined with one another working togheter as an integrated system and requirements, documentation and implementation all have to be linked and baselined with version management I'd like toshare my thoughts on this subject.

- Make the save as new version optional

- Make the comment optional

- auto save is already configureable at the moment but given different organizations and way teams work maybe make it project specific to set.

- ability to baseline an entire project thus versioning the entire set of parts

- diff information between versions, amount of features changed etc

Actually, about versioning and colleberation a lot can be learned from the version management tool Git or the older SVN. I'm sure the F360 developers are familiar with those. 😉

[casperhofstede]

Interesting, this topic: Autodesk Forums - Better Versioning Has similar points of feedback and ideas. Either way. Room for improvement.

I did some more thinking on change sets or checking the difference between versions or componenets(!). Thinking I had an awesome idea nobody else had come up with yet I was about to put it here. But then I googled and found this:

https://github.com/blog/1633-3d-file-diffs

Which explains my point perfectly. It would be great in the revision/version viewer to be able to mark two files and see the difference highlighted, what was added in green, what was removed in red. Tada, done, instant visual information.

The reason I also mention it would be nice to check different components is because it can also be practical to see the difference between a parent and a derived component (different files) or when someone has worked on the same component but saved it seperately.

[michaelbuffington]

9 months and many updates later and I'm still required to enter the name of a version when I manually save.

9 months and many updates later and I still need to manually save after every step because the app is still the most unstable piece of software I've ever used.

[maximumiq]

Hi,

I really dont understand why you get the option of giving your version a name, because its not really obvious what it can be used for.

I have looked at my designs versions with the info circle in the design's panel in the data panel, but no - you cannot see the name there.

So - why is ADF360 bugging me every time i want to save a days work, if I cannot relate the name to a version later on.

Maybe I havnt found the hidden secret, but in that case this would be a road to improvement. Let the use see the names easily.

[cjrosales]

Saving a file should be different to commiting a change (version) in history, and different to releasing or tagging a relevant point in the version history.

Workbench by Grabcad is really neat about that, you might want to try or look at that.

[Scoox]

I've started learning Fusion 360 today. I'm the kind who saves regularly but in Fusion 360 the save function gets in the way, and discourages manual saves. IMO it would be better to provide separate commands to "save" and "save new version". Autosave is also handy, but only as a complement, not a substitute, for Save.

In Fusion 360, having to type a version name/description every time a casual save is needed is quite a flow killer. I honestly don't know what to type, whatever I type is bound to be as insignificant as the changes that took place since the previous save operation. At the moment I'm just typing in a time stamp, I could also type "Just savin' to be safe, you know the drill".

The difference between saving and saving a version is simple: saving averts disaster in the event of a crash, while committing a version represents a milestone in a project. Based on my experience, every other piece of software I've used that features some form of versioning facility also provides a separate manual "save" command.

I'm here only because I just had my first crash and autosave didn't quite catch everything I had done up until the crash.

[michaelbuffington]

Over 4 years later and I'm still press CMD+S, then Enter to save the useless "User Saved" version name. I've also been burned twice today with random pre-save crashes, losing about an hour of work.

I must be missing out on the value of this feature that redefines the idea of "saving" something on a computer, a pattern that's worked for decades, followed by nearly every application capable of saving atomic data. To have the awkward feature of naming a version stick around this long must mean that the majority of Fusion 360 users find the feature extremely valuable, right?

Forgive the sarcasm, but seriously, how is this feature justified? Who uses it? Have you ever pulled the numbers to see what percentage of Fusion 360 users name their versions? I can't imagine the numbers are in favor of version namers.

Am I wrong?

[Scoox]

How about this: We could have saved versions and a "working" version. Then:

Ctrl+S overwrites the working version. If the project has not yet been saved, the user is prompted for a project name (e.g. "Gearbox") and then the project is saved but no backup versions have been created yet.

Ctrl+Shift+S saves the working version and, additionally, creates a named backup version, kind of like a snapshot, which the user can revert to at a later stage. In this case the user is prompted for a version description which, by default, can be the usual "User saved".

Most of my saves are not significant enough to be worth up-versioning. The main reason for me, a single user, to save  my work is because I know Fusion 360 can and does crash quite often. The reality is I seldom need to revisit saved versions because, as a single user, the latest version is what I'm interested in.

For comparison's sake, GIT works similar to the way I'm suggesting here: First, you work on your files, the working files, which are saved locally. Each time you save the files is overwritten, that would be our Ctrl+S, for the working files. Then, when you've got to a point where you think your work is worth publishing or sharing, you commit it as a version. At this point, the newly created version and the working files are identical. That's our Ctrl+Shift+S. In Fusion 360, the working version can still be saved to the server, just not as a version. Perhaps it could be shown in the browser as "Working version", followed by all the consciously saved named versions below it.

It stands to reason that with GIT saving the working version happens much more often than version commits which perhaps happen once or twice during the day, therefore it makes sense to use the simpler key shortcut (Ctrl+S) for the most frequently used action, and the more complex key shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+S) for saving named versions.

[cjrosales]

One more thought about it.. Saving the working copy in the cloud is a very nice idea.

I'd suggest that your Ctrl+S basically creates a "working" branch and commits there everytime you save (so you keep your work in the cloud as well). One can rewrite that history as well, as one can do with git, if interested.

And then your Ctrl+Shift+S would merge that branch into "master" (the typical name for the stable  branch in git).

Or probably, it'd be easier if F360 exposes  all git commands to the user 😉

Best,

[Scoox]

@cjrosales The idea was indeed to keep the working files in the cloud. However, I think it might be better not to over-engineer this, because terminology such as "merging" will almost definitely confuse people who are not familiar with GIT. I think a simple versioning system like we have now is adequate for most users. I only mentioned GIT just to make a point; I never meant this should work like GIT, although perhaps for users who need more flexible version control GIT integration could be worth a thought or two.